Tomichan’s Farming

 

Sunday Raving

When I left my job in Delhi a year after Modi became the supremo of Indraprastha, one of the many gawking phone calls I received was from a Malayali working in Delhi as a teacher. The old gen Malayalis are very inquisitive by birth. Their top priority is to find out what’s cooking in the neighbour’s kitchen. [The new gen is just the opposite. They don’t bother about what’s cooking in their own kitchen. They are busy with their smartphones even while eating and will be happier if nothing is cooking in their own kitchen so that food of their choice can be ordered via Zomato or something.] So this guy whom I had met a couple of times at one of CBSE’s evaluation centres called me to find out whether I was still surviving. He is a typical Malayali who loves to hear bad news about others. So I told him, “I’m in a remote village cultivating brinjals.” Like all Malayalis who are experts with innuendo, he understood it was time to hang up.

I was living in a rented house at that time while teaching in the most prominent school of the area. There was no way I could cultivate brinjals. Later when I built my own house, I did cultivate brinjals, bitter gourds, ivy gourds, tomatoes, okra, tapioca, Taro root, and a few other things including mint. Most of them were utter failures. But I haven’t given up. Even now I have some brinjal of my own.

Brinjal

My latest experiment is with pepper. I bought two bush pepper [കുറ്റി  കുരുമുളക്] saplings from a Kerala government horticulture nursery and planted one of them in a pot and one in the garden.

Bush pepper - potted yesterday

Now, the lesson I learnt from my farming experiments so far. It’s immensely entertaining, taxing (almost as arm-twisting as governments), demanding in the form of water and manure and regular weeding… After all that, you may get a few brinjals and ivy gourds. I seldom get back the amount I spend on them. Nevertheless, I keep digging. For the heck of it. And to be a good follower of Albert Camus, my guru, who taught me that the universe is necessarily a hostile place and it is every man’s (and woman’s as well, I guess) duty to carry the Sisyphean boulder up life’s hill.

For my latest bush pepper experiment, I have spent a princely sum on the various materials required in addition to the free soil. Coco peat, dolomite, bone meal, vermi-compost, and neem cakes. I was about to order North India’s sacred cow dung from Amazon when Maggie told me it’s free, though not sacred perhaps, from my brother’s cowshed.

My Moovandan

One of the two mango trees I planted five years ago started giving us fruits two years back. Now it’s soothingly productive. The second one which I bought from a “scientific” nursery is yet to put out even a single bloom. The one which produces delicious Moovandan fruits had come free from my sister-in-law. Sometimes, the unscientific things are far better.